We took a long weekend and headed out early Thursday morning to Salt Lake to spend Rudi’s mom’s 80th birthday with her. While she is fine with other people’s birthdays, her own birthday holds some painful memories, so she likes to keep it low-key. We celebrated with a tour of her garden (she’s finally had some help with it this summer), a pizza dinner, episodes of Midsommer Murders, and a trip to the grocery store.

Rudi’s mom needed to stick close to home on Friday, but urged us to head up to the mountains, before joining her for supper. Rudi mentioned a rapid-fire tour of 45 or so mountainous areas, but I had a destination in mind — Silver Lake. Margene has shown so many photos of it that it’d grown to rather mythical proportions in my mind. Rudi agreed that was a pleasant and worthy visit, and it did not disappoint, with an easy raised walkway around the perimeter of a picturesque, shallow mountain lake and through its surrounding wetland. I’d hoped to see either moose or beavers, since both frequent the area, but had to content myself with a mule deer and a frog and lots of anticipation at what the various rustlings might be. We did see signs of moose, both there (wallows in the wetland grasses) and higher up in the mountains of Brighton (tracks — impressively large; I also saw a couple hawks, including one quite close up).

We swam in the hotel pool, visited several coffeehouses (including one where I ate a very tasty crepe cake), sampled local sodas, and watched the sun rise on Saturday, something I never see except when traveling. We returned home yesterday just as the sun was setting, and spent today recovering (Rudi’s recovery of a 60-mile bike ride is far more active than mine). I hit the farmers market, chatted with my folks on the phone, went to the garden, sat in the park, and finished reading a book.

All in all, a pleasant way to spend the final weekend of August.

Weekending along with Karen at Pumpkin Sunrise.